Today we will continue our exploration of Roche Fusion’s development process that we started last week.
We will do so from a technical point of view, exploring some of the various systems I developed for the game. With my role as team-lead and graphics programmer, this mostly means that we will mostly be looking at graphical effects.
A few days ago I was idly scrolling through my twitter history reminiscing about the last few years of my activities as game developer. For about two years a major part of that – and my life in general – has been Roche Fusion, the game project I started together with Tom Rijnbeek in September 2013, and which we finally finished – with a team of 7 – in January 2015.
For today’s post I thought I step through the major points of Roche Fusion’s early development from a technical standpoint, and give some insight in our development process.
Last week we looked at how we can use the builder pattern to build shader programs out of individual shaders. We abstracted away all actual functionality in favour of a clean and easy to read interface.
In that post we assumed the existence of a shader manager – an object that held track of all our shaders and that we could ask for any of them given their type and a string name.
Today we will design a system fulfilling those requirements. Our goal is having this system take over as much work as possible, so that we do not have to bother with any of the details when using it.
Additionally we will look at how we can easily and automatically load shaders from code files – though this part of the system could be easily replaced by one loading them from a different source.
We will take an incremental approach to these topics, building our system step by step, according to our requirements.
Last week I wrote about how we can use parametric equations in particle systems.
Doing so allowed us to eliminate mutability from our particles. In that post I already hinted that this property allows us to easily move our particles to be simulated on the GPU.
That is what we will do today!
Today I want to delve a bit further into graphics programming and look into one specific effect we used in Roche Fusion: Pixelation.
We use the effect in the game as a visual queue for when the player takes damage and their health falls to dangerous levels.
Specifically, the post processing effect we apply pixelates the edges of the screen significantly, while leaving the center, and to some degree the bottom corners mostly untouched.
This allows the player to still continue playing, and to inspect their HUD, but it gives a clear and unmistakable indication of danger.
Of course, the effect could also be used for other purposes, such as transitions between levels, or even a major part of the art style.